About Navin Chaddha

Navin Chaddha is responsible for the overall leadership of Mayfield Fund. He is a proven serial entrepreneur and venture investor. He was named a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum, has been named four times to the Forbes Midas List of Top Tech investors including for 2012, and was named to the Always on Power Players West, Always On Cloud and Always on Mobile list of top investors. Navin invests in the companies that leverage the drivers of cloud/SaaS, mobile, energy and big data and oversees Mayfield’s dedicated India fund.

November 12, 2012

Rules of the Road for the Era of Simplicity, Mobile and the Social Web


SocialI have been involved in the technology industry for 20 years as a serial entrepreneur, corporate executive and investor. There are some key rules of the road that have guided my journey and these are especially relevant in the current era when the social Web is dominant, mobile platforms are ubiquitous and consumers are demanding simplicity. As an entrepreneur, I believe that living by some core beliefs is key to leading teams and building companies that last. Here are a few of my fundamental beliefs, illustrated with examples from the entrepreneurs that we are working with.

The Customer is Queen:

Actively listening to your customers and rapidly iterating to reflect customer needs has never been so important. From a vendor of cloud-integrated storage appliances to a mobile fashion marketplace, Mayfield Fund entrepreneurs like Ursheet Parikh and Guru Pangal of StorSimple and Manish Chandra of Poshmark, who constantly listen, react and respond to customer feedback, are finding a quick path to customer engagement.Continue Reading

Filed Under: Big Data, Cloud / SaaS, Energy, Mobile, Social
September 22, 2012

Navin Chaddha Shares Mayfield View on Marketplaces

SocialThe U.S. e-commerce market is estimated at $200 billion and is still projected to account for only 9 percent of total retail by 2016 (source: Forrester Research Feb. 2012 U.S. Online Retail forecast). We believe there is ample room for growth, and much of it will come from marketplaces. The metaphor of online marketplaces, established by Amazon and eBay starting in 1995, has endured and is flourishing once again – but in a different way than in the past. From an investor point of view, four things have changed:

The Rise of Vertical: The e-commerce market is large enough to support vertical marketplaces that super-serve consumer needs and are defying the “winner take all” theory that eBay or Amazon will be the only game in town. These vertical marketplaces have tuned the user experience to very specific needs by vertical and are easier to achieve liquidity due to their focus. Examples include Homeaway (vacation rentals), Etsy (niche artisan goods), and OpenTable (restaurant reservations).Continue Reading

Filed Under: Mobile, Social
June 18, 2012

Solving the pain points of mobile developers

Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers partner Mary Meeker pointed out the following facts in the 2012 Annual Internet Trends report and the Cisco Visual Networking Index report:

  • There are 953 million smartphone subscribers today;
  • The number of mobile-connected devices will exceed the world’s population in 2012;
  • Cloud-connected services will account for 71 percent of total mobile data traffic in 2016.

According to a recent survey conducted by mobile development and cloud platform provider (and one of my portfolio investments) Appcelerator, mobile developers are enthusiastically embracing cloud services.Continue Reading

Filed Under: Mobile
and March 28, 2012

Going Green: Investing In Consumer Focused Energy Tech

In recent years, the revolutionary opportunities in the energy sector have attracted billions of dollars from early stage venture investors. But the venture world has learned some hard lessons on the difficulty of building energy businesses: they face science risk, often take a long time to scale and can be capital intensive.

While the overall appetite for venture-backed energy suppliers has cooled, we believe there are abundant opportunities for entrepreneurs to innovate on the ‘demand-side’ of energy markets. We are seeing a wave of new energy companies developing technologies focused on energy efficiency. Alas, most of these companies fall short when it comes to bridging that crucial gap between technical innovation and customer adoption. Similar to the trend toward consumerization of IT, we believe the companies that are poised to explode and redefine the energy tech landscape are the ones that are putting the consumer in the driver’s seat. Their value goes beyond the promise of energy efficiency, to deliver products and services that delight users, make them accessible through innovative business models, and understand the mindset of the energy consumer.Continue Reading

Filed Under: Energy
March 18, 2012

The Mobile Revolution: Startup Ideas For Changing The World

We have entered the mobile era of computing. And just like the previous eras – those of the mainframe, then the client-server and the PC – the mobile era is a fundamental shift with a new set of problems to solve.

The key to the mobile era is that it’s all about delighting and empowering the end user. The end user interacts with technology the way he/she interacts with the world around them. It will be hard for incumbents to embrace this new paradigm, just as it was hard for mainframe-era leaders to dominate the world of PCs, or for PC giants to pivot to embrace the Web. Similar to how Cisco and Polycom pioneered telepresence, but it took Skype to bring videoconferencing to the masses, we believe that a new mobile world order will emerge, with leaders being created by entrepreneurs and disruptors.

Three trends are shaping these opportunities.Continue Reading

Filed Under: Mobile